Security

Alan Meckler is one of the brightest visionaries in the tech world having launched the first show covering the Internet in the 1990s – Internet World, part of Mecklermedia. He was underestimated and denigrated by virtually all the traditional tech publishers and trade show producers at the time, yet his event grew faster than any show I have ever seen.

I attended many of these conferences in New York and Los Angeles and saw with my own eyes how professionally run and vibrant these fast-growing shows were.

At the most recent IoT Evolution Expo in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, we had a chance to interview a number of the companies shaping the future of the IoT space. Cradlepoint (below) for example had a lot of exciting news to share such as the company's recent SDN acquisition and how this relates to keeping IoT devices secure and scaling properly.

Gemalto too had some great news to share - their secure IoT solutions are doing well in the market thanks to mainstream hacking publicity. He went on to detail various threats companies need to keep in mind - after a risk assessment they work backwards from.

If there was a trend, it was optimism... Here is the complete list of IoT companies interviewed:

Quite often when we think about hackers, we imagine there is someone looking to gain something of value from us. In response, we plan our computer and network security strategy with this in mind. For example, many attacks have targeted credit cards as companies like Target have learned about the hard way. Their breach cost them hundreds of millions - $200 million actually and counting.

Its an interesting world we live in where a group like Anonymous which likely wasn't thought very highly has become a savior thanks to their efforts to combat ISIS. The Obama administration, Putin and the rest of the world which has lost their citizens to ISIS may have done less to hurt this organization in 18 months than Anonymous has done in a few days of fighting this organization.

President Obama has said repeatedly and so has Hillary Clinton that we are fighting an ideology. So any logical and sane person would put two and two together and figure out if ISIS is using social media extremely well to spread their ideology, then maybe we should shut down their twitter accounts, right? Doesn't the CIA and NSA have tens of billions of dollars at their disposal to keep the US safe?

You really need to have nerves of steel when you give the car keys to your teen child for the first time. At that very moment, a parent can have a traumatic episode where they remember their child's entire life while simultaneously reliving every near-miss collision and accident they've ever witnessed or been involved in.

The good news is, technology allows new and innovative solutions to this problem most every parent may have to face at one time or another. Specifically, BuckleMate was founded by Jeffrey Miller who serves as CEO, to deal with this issue. The following interview goes into detail regarding how his company can help make teen driving a safer endeavor and perhaps it can become simultaneously less traumatic.

Tell me about BuckleMate – how did the idea come to you?

I came across a product about 5 years ago that would force drivers to Buckle their seat belts.

The biometrics market has been around for decades but never achieved widespread acceptance until after Apple rolled out TouchID. Laptop makers flirted with the technology about a decade ago but never got their systems to work very well. Apple – to its credit, released a solution which is very good.

I’ve been among the first people to realize how drones can be a major problem for security in the world. In February 2014, in fact, I said there was a coming urban drone war and since then, drones with guns and explosives have been created. More recently I wrote about drones almost being used to attack federal buildings in Connecticut – thankfully without success and how a drone flew to the White House. I even wrote about a possible solution to the problem using microphones from SmartSense.

Security experts agree – there is absolutely no way to ensure your network is 100% safe from cybercriminals – if they really want to get in, they will. All you can do is put as many layers down in front of them to make your system less attractive. In addition, malicious users have become experts at writing code which varies its port usage and encrypts packets to be virtually invisible to many of today’s forensic tools as they hide in normal traffic flows.

Moreover, breaches typically start with a break-in or infiltration, then there is reconnaissance and finally, exfiltration.